The invention relates to an electric toothbrush with a handle which is to be manually guided and comprises a motor and gearing, and with a brush member which has a brush head with several cylindrical bristle holders rotating separately next to one another. Such a toothbrush is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,156,620.
In this known toothbrush, the brush member is not movable. The teeth are cleaned exclusively by the rotating movement of the bristle holders.
In the toothbrush known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,156,620 there is a connecting rod which is constructed as a toothed rack in the region of the brush head. The bristle holders each carry a gearwheel inside the brush head, all gearwheels in a row of bristle holders intermeshing and each second gearwheel in a row engaging in teeth in the toothed rack. Therefore, the adjacent bristle holders rotate in opposite directions when the connecting rod moves to and fro, and this is advantageous for cleaning teeth.
The known toothbrush is relatively complicated in construction owing to the plurality of gearwheels and the connecting rod constructed as a toothed rack. To prevent the gearwheels from jamming, the toothbrush must be produced with very close production tolerances. This entails high production costs and is accompanied by the risk of even slight inaccuracies in production leading to an interruption in operation.